Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, is driven by an uncontrollable lust for her young stepson. Rejected and isolated, she has planned a terrible revenge. This modern retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy is performed by one man. Words, music, images and dance intertwine to lead us down the dark alleyways of sexual obsession. Written by a man, dedicated to a man, directed by a man, and performed by a man – this is an attempt, through men’s eyes, to enter the soul of a woman tormented by unlawful desire.

PHAEDRA was performed at The Cockpit Theatre (Gateforth Street, Marylebone, London, NW8 8EH) as part of 2012 The CockSquat Festival.

Premièred at the RADA Festival Gielgud Theatre, 28th and 30th June 2017

In 1928, Jean Cocteau – already a legend of French cultural life and friend to Proust, Picasso, Stravinsky, Man Ray and Lee Miller among others – checked himself into a clinic in order to be cured of an uncontrollable addiction to opium. At the same time, in another room of the clinic, his lover Jean Desbordes was being treated for the same addiction. During that time, Cocteau kept a diary of his nightmarish cure, together with a series of revealing and unsettling drawings.

Opium: A Diary of His Cure (1930) is an unflinching record of the hair-raising recovery from his addiction to opium, with all its attendant creative possibilities and profound dangers, its disturbing physical and mental side-effects and its unnerving tampering with the unconscious. The artist experiences a dissociation between the mind, jumping between ecstatic memories of the drug, obsessions and fragmented revelations as it searches for resolution and relief, and the body, which embarks on its own tormented and humiliating path.

It is his account and these drawings that have been the basis of our work. The music in the piece has been inspired by a composition entitles ‘Vexations’ by another friend of Cocteau’s, Erik Satie.